“That I do.” He smiled and got up to pour brandy for us from a crystal decanter, looking at home with Karen’s lovely things. “I’ll just go and see about Denys. He probably needs a drink.”
“You’re well situated now, aren’t you?” Karen said when he’d gone. I could feel something new in her gaze, maybe an unspoken question about whether my marriage to Mansfield was the real article or a sham. Whatever it meant, it made me uncomfortable. “You look awfully well.”
“It’s the pearls,” I said.
“You’ve worn pearls before.”
She meant when I’d been with Frank Greswolde, not that she would ever have had the bad taste to mention it. But surely she could see that Mansfield wasn’t just any man ready to pay my way. He wasn’t a sponsor—Cockie’s terrible word—but my husband.
The dog whimpered in a dream at Karen’s feet, flinching and twitching her paws. “We strike such dark bargains for love, don’t we?”
Do we? I thought as Karen settled the hound with one hand, like a mother and her babe. But I didn’t answer her.
One hundred and twenty miles north of Nairobi, Elburgon was cool in the morning, with sparkling, crisp skies and high, white flat-bottomed clouds. After a rain, mist settled in rifts along the hillsides, and I would take all of it in, walking to gallops in the early mornings, reminding myself that none of it was borrowed or tainted. That no one could try to ruin it for me, or take it away.
Our farm was called Melela, with a house that stood on stilts, dripping with blue bougainvillaea and flame vine. Purple passion fruit covered the back fence, and morning glories heaped over the veranda and arbour. Everywhere you looked there was a new splash of colour, and the air smelled alive. I had a heavy brass bell installed outside the main stable door, not long after we moved in, and Ruta rang it to wake the farm every morning before dawn, as our head groom, Wainina, had once done at Green Hills. Ruta and his family had a cottage near the stables, and he had his own office next to mine, though usually we found ourselves at the same desk, staring into the same ledger, side by side.
“What if we brought Clutt back from Cape Town to train for us?” I asked Mansfield in bed one night. I had been thinking about it for weeks, growing more excited by the idea and what it would mean. Money had kept my father away, and also the tarnishing of his reputation. But I was in a position to offer him a job and a prestigious place in the colony, one worthy of him and his talents.
“Would he consider an offer?”
“I think so. If it was sweet enough.”
“With two Clutterbucks in one stable, I don’t think the rest of Kenya could touch us.”
“You don’t know how happy that would make me, how right this feels.”
I sent off a cable immediately, and before two months passed, I had my father back. He’d aged, and his hair had grown grey and thin, his face more careworn—but the very sight of him seemed to heal something in me. I had been so young when he left, hopelessly overwhelmed by my marriage, and the terrible loss of the farm. Nearly eight years had passed, and more heartbreak than I could properly chart for him, or even myself. But there wasn’t any need to tell him my sad stories, or even the happy ones. I only wanted to stand by him at the paddock gate and watch one of our stallions run for all he was worth. To work by his side for a common goal. To be his daughter again—yes, that would do it.
Emma looked older, too, of course, and she seemed subdued if not any softer. But I found she didn’t unsettle me as she used to. I’d become the mistress of a household. She was our guest at Melela, so what did it matter if she found me too coarse or headstrong now? Her opinion didn’t mean as much as my own, or Mansfield’s.
As it turned out, Mansfield and Emma got on well. They both liked gardening and soon could be seen kneeling together in domed sun hats, talking about root fungus or leaf blight, while I escaped to the stable where I belonged.
“What was Cape Town like?” I asked my father on one of the first mornings he was back. We leaned against the fencing along our gallops, watching one of our grooms exercise Clemency, a pretty new filly.
“Hot.” He kicked dust from his boots, squinting into the flaring sun. “Competitive, too. The wins didn’t come often.”
“If we hadn’t asked you back, would you have stayed?”
“I suppose so. I’m glad to be here, though. This is grand.”
As ever my father hoarded his words and his feelings, but I didn’t care. I knew he was proud of me and how far I’d come. I could feel it as we stood side by side, looking out over the green bowl of the spreading valley.
“It’s the same view that we had at Njoro,” I told him. “A little further north, but everything else is the same.”
“I suppose it is,” he said. “You’ve done well for yourself.”